LITMIR.BIZ

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at the door. Xander drew back like a man bitten. Eyes like burning black coals scorched her a blistering look. Two hot streaks raked his high cheekbones; his mouth pulsed visibly even though it was suddenly stretched taut. She was panting and still clinging to his hair, the green of her eyes glazed by the stunning shock of her own loss of control.

      ‘This had better be your awakening, cara, or you’re dead,’ he blasted down at her, voice rusted by jealous desire.

      Before she could construct any kind of answer he had moved away, landing on his feet beside the bed. He did not look at her again until he’d stridden to the door and grasped the handle. The pause he made then sang between them, stretched taut and raw by that final rasping threat.

      He was angry—still angry. The kiss had been delivered in anger, the deliberate assault of angry passion that left her lying here hot and trembling, shaken to her core by her own response, her mouth, her body, her deserted breast with its stinging nipple feeling utterly, shamefully bereft.

      ‘Hypocrite,’ she heard herself whisper across a throat thickened by the bubble of tears to come.

      The charge swung him round to lance her with a hard, glinting look. ‘And primitive with it,’ he extended grimly. ‘Forget the lover,’ he warned thinly. ‘You will not be laying eyes on him again.’

      The note in his tone brought Nell upright. ‘Why—w-what have you done to him?’ she demanded in alarm.

      ‘As yet—nothing.’ His eyes blackened dangerously. ‘His fate rests in the future when I have more time to discover if he taught you more than just how to kiss.’

      Nell blinked then blushed at his thinking behind that revealing comment. He thought it was Marcel who’d taught her to kiss as she’d just done! Her kiss-numb lips parted to speak a denial then closed again. Let his primitive side twist his gut, she thought angrily, lowering her gaze from the piercing hardness of his. Let him learn what it felt like to imagine her locked in naked passion with another man as she had spent the last year imagining him with Vanessa the tramp!

      ‘I will be away for the next few days but will be back in time to collect you from here on Saturday.’

      This final piece of news brought her eyes flickering up again as he opened the door and left without another word, allowing whoever had knocked on the door earlier to come into the room.

      It was one of his personal bodyguards, his polite greeting spoiled by the tough look on his face. He placed something down on the bedside cupboard. ‘Mr Pascalis gave his permission for you to have these,’ he said, then went to leave the room.

      ‘H-how long have you been standing out there?’ she asked, horrified that he might have heard or—worse—seen what had been going on in here through the little window in the door!

      ‘Since you arrived in this hospital,’ Jake Mather replied.

      Nell stared at the door closing behind Jake Mather’s bulky frame. She’d been under guard without even knowing it. She was in prison. She had been completely surrounded and isolated from the outside world. A shiver shot through her. It was like being back at Rosemere only worse.

      Mr Pascalis gave his permission…She turned her head to look at what Xander had kindly given his permission to.

      It was a neat stack of magazines. Reaching out to pick the top one of the stack, she let it unfold so she could see the front page in all its damning glory. ‘Greek tycoon’s wife tries to kill herself after he flaunts his mistress.’

      No wonder he saw no threat in a scandal—it was already here!

      She plucked up another paper and another, swapped them for the magazines. Scandal galore was splashed across the pages. There were even photographs of her wrecked car! She turned the page on those pictures quickly as nausea swam up inside.

      But there was no mention of Marcel anywhere, which told her exactly what Xander was doing. Her imprisonment here had nothing to do with contracts or primitive demonstrations of ownership—but with damage control, pure and simple damage control!

      He didn’t want it reported that his wife had been leaving him for another man when she crashed her car!

      He would rather they report that she was attempting to kill herself. What did that say about the size of his ego?

      Kill herself? Where had they dragged up that big lie from? Had Xander himself put it out there?

      She hated him. Oh, God, she hated him. No wonder she was being so thoroughly isolated. He didn’t want her retaliating with the truth!

      Leaving him for another man…Oh, how she wished she’d managed to go through with it. She would have written her own headline. ‘Wife of philandering Greek tycoon leaves him for Frenchman!’

      CHAPTER THREE

      STANDING unnoticed in the doorway, Xander watched Nell’s trembling fingers grapple with the intricacies of fastening the tiny pearl buttons on the silky white blouse he’d had delivered to her along with a blue linen suit that did amazing things for her slender shape.

      Someone had fixed her hair for her and it lay in a thick, shining, sandstorm braid to halfway down her back. She looked very pale, though the bruising on her face had almost disappeared. But it was clear to him that even the simplest of tasks still came as an effort.

      She was not recovered, though the doctors had assured him that she was fit to travel and for now that was all he cared about: getting her away from here and to a place void of tabloid gossip—and the temptation to contact her lover the first opportunity she was handed.

      His blood began to boil when he thought about the elusive Marcel Dubois. The Frenchman had disappeared into the ether like the scarlet pimpernel, and maybe showed some sense in doing so—sense being something he had not shown when he’d decided to make his play for the wife of Alexander Pascalis.

      Wife…He could almost laugh at the title but laughing was not what was lurking inside him. His hooded eyes took on a murderous glitter as he watched Nell struggle with those tiny pearl buttons. Had his wife in name only lain with her Frenchman and allowed him to touch what Xander had not touched? Had Dubois seen power in her soft, willing body and those little confidences a woman like the love-vulnerable Nell would reveal to a lover about the emptiness of her marriage?

      She turned then and noticed him standing there. His libido instantly kicked in to join the murderous feelings as her eyes began to make their rise up from his shoes to the casual black brushed-cotton chinos covering his legs and the plain white T-shirt moulding his chest. No other woman had ever looked at him the way Nell looked at him, with a slow, verdant absorption that drenched him in hellishly erotic self-awareness. She could not help herself, he knew that, which made the idea of her giving those looks to another man all the more potent. When she reached his shoulders, covered by the casual black linen jacket he was wearing, he could not halt the small recognising shift of muscle that sent a shower of pleasurable static rushing through his blood.

      One day soon he was going to give this awareness true substance, he promised. He was going to wipe out all memory of her other man and introduce her to his power with all its naked, hot passion.

      He was no neanderthal; he did not need a woman to be a virgin to enjoy her. But this one, this beautiful freak of modern living with her innocence steeped in womanly desire for him that she still did not have the tools to hide whatever the Frenchman had taught her, was going to open up like a chrysalis under his guidance and fly with him into ecstasy. She owed him that much.

      She’d reached his face at last and Xander lost the murderous look to give her the benefit of a slow, easy smile, which she dealt with by flicking her eyes away. Nell was no fool. The last time he was here he had thrown down the sexual gauntlet and the smile was to remind her of it.

      ‘Ready to come with me?’ he enquired with the kind of soft challenge that had her breath feathering a quiver across the thrust of her breasts.

      ‘I have no make-up,’ she complained.

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